Christopher Wool’s art takes shape within an abstract expressionist trajectory determined by a variable, experimental, and minimal production, simultaneously charged with an anarchic energy. He attempts to control the chaotic order of the surface, which integrates digital marks alongside painterly gestural attitudes and typographic contributions. In other words, he produces the outcomes of an intertextual encounter that renders visible the relationship between language and meaning emerging under the psychological conditions of an uncanny production environment.

the variable performance of the early period

Wool’s early paintings are formed beyond any ideological positioning, through tense surface relations experienced on a seemingly contradictory axis. That is, although they propose a conceptual quality, they refuse the possibility of positioning anywhere outside their psychological and cultural connotations. Moreover, here he seeks to draw attention to an anarchist spirit and energy that determines the visual language. Consequently, this venture that boldly interrogates its own painting reveals, in many respects, the austere results of experimental paint applications.

In the first phase, the artist confronts harshly such issues as decoration, design, and language that problematize the commodification process of modern painting, then rapidly adopts an understanding of surface design based on repetition. Through floral-patterned paintings, he transitions to a Minimalist procedure, arriving at abstract arrangements that appear extremely radical. Precisely at this stage, a crude and emotional paint rhetoric comes into play—one that displaces legible images and is either covered over or reinforced by printing techniques. The abstract-conceptual arrangements categorized under the name Language Paintings, which bring the calligraphy of letters and words closer to graffiti aesthetics, emerge as an anti-painting approach with manipulated, fragmented, and irregularly spaced elements within a logic of syncopated rhythmic order. These provocative paintings position themselves at a distance through their lyrical connections. Furthermore, they do not delay in evolving into radical abstract arrangements with Wool’s turn toward monochrome paint usage.

Indeed, Wool’s paintings reach monochrome, pure painterly abstractions with a mature aesthetic comprehension in a short time. Dense and layered surfaces are presented as closed psychic fields created through simultaneous interventions. These monochrome abstractions must inevitably be seen in terms of the dynamism of paint movements. However, it would be more appropriate to characterize them as internal and contradictory interpretations developed upon the idea of order and chaos—interpretations that resist parodic impulses, beyond any modernist emulation.

 the products of an abrasion practice

Already, photographic series and experimental prints consisting of scenes of alienation and decay that convey the tension between control and disorder gradually consolidate this shared and subversive creative will. Thus, this search for multiple languages achieves a rich diversity of production that also encompasses sculpture. The chaos created with metal rods seems structured here as the equivalent of an erosive urban vernacular language that finds its meaning in sculptural practice.

Christopher Wool generally maintains an approach that works with abstract forms, directing or renewing painting’s expressive potential through strategies of multiplication, erasure, and manipulation. His paintings that most clearly reveal this scope are also, in fact (and always), an aesthetic element that inverts the image sequence, formed through expressionless repetitions or collaged with different components.